Ron here. Four days into the Porsche Europe route, and this is the day most guests describe as the actual peak of the week — not just because of the altitude.
Austria’s highest paved road, and it’s been here since 1935
The Grossglockner High Alpine Road opened in 1935, and it remains Austria’s highest paved through-road nearly a century later — a genuine feat of pre-war engineering that still does exactly what it was built to do. The climb passes viewpoints over the Pasterze glacier, Austria’s largest, visible from the road in a way that puts the entire day’s altitude gain into perspective before you’ve even reached the top. This isn’t a road that was retrofitted for tourism decades after it was built for something else. It was built to be driven and looked at, from day one.
What the climb actually feels like
The road works its way up through a series of switchbacks that give you real time to take in how much the landscape changes as you climb — alpine meadows giving way to bare rock and snow, the air noticeably thinner by the upper sections. It’s less about any single dramatic corner and more about the sustained sense of altitude building the entire way up, which is exactly why the helicopter flight that follows lands as well as it does: you’ve already felt the climb from inside a car, and now you see the same peaks from above.
The helicopter, and why it’s not just a gimmick
An exclusive helicopter flight over the alpine peaks follows the drive — and it’s worth being honest about why this works rather than feeling like an add-on bolted onto a driving day. You’ve spent the morning experiencing this landscape at road level, switchback by switchback. Seeing the same peaks from the air afterward isn’t a separate experience, it’s the other half of the same one — the scale of what you just drove through, from a perspective the road itself can’t give you.
Where the day ends
210 kilometers total, closing with spa pampering at Laschenskyhof and dinner in-house — the last of the route’s four spa evenings, and by most guests’ account, the one that lands hardest after a day like this one.
This is Day 4 of Pure Adrenalin’s Porsche Europe Road Trip. Curious how three different supercars handled this same climb? Read the full road test. See the complete route.